Month: December 2012

Eat Your Meat! How Can You Show Appreciation for Life, If you Won’t Eat Your Meat?

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“You’d eat it if you were on the field of battle,” Dad said when I displayed preferences regarding the food he prepared. “You’d eat it if you were hungry, but you’ve never known hunger, not in the sense that others have.”

Convincing children to show appreciation for food is a time-honored concern that dates back to the cavemen. When the caveman’s children stated they were tired of eating Mammoth, their mother probably felt compelled to remind them of the sacrifice and danger their father faced to provide them with their meal of the day. In those days, acquiring food was much more perilous than a drive to the grocery store. We can assume what the tales were like, those stories of peril the hunters went through, but we can also assume that the stories eventually bored the children. Later in the timeline, parents informed their children of the lack of available preservation techniques: “Eat it all, or it will go bad.” Modern technology provides safer and easier access to food, as well as preservation techniques that have become so common for so many generations that most parents have never been hungry, not in the sense that others have, and they’ve taken food for granted for the whole of their lives too.

The trick to convincing children to appreciate food is more difficult today than ever before. Some parents inform their children of the plight of third-world children, hoping to instill appreciation for what’s on their plates. My dad knew little of that, but he knew the life of a military man. He knew C-rations, and he learned about the scarcity some endured during the Great Depression secondhand. He attempted to use that knowledge to stoke appreciation for food in his boys.

The theme of Dad’s stories was that the manner in which one eats is a window into their soul. He also believed it a testament to manliness and anyone who questioned his manliness need only look to the girth he carried for much of his life for answers. He was a human garbage disposal, and he expected as much from his sons.

“I never had to worry about you eating,” Dad said. “Your brother caused me some concern. He’s finicky.” That would prove to be one of the greatest compliments my dad ever gave me.

Finicky was the only F-word in my dad’s vocabulary. A finicky eater, to him, was that certain someone who thought they were so special that they took matters for granted. He considered them oddballs, and he viewed them in an unkind manner. My brother’s finicky nature reared its ugly head most often when onions appeared on his plate. His open disdain for them was a constant source of embarrassment for our dad.

Dad was Old World. He lived in an era when the gravest insult a man could heap upon a host was to leave a morsel of food on their plate. Most descendants of Depression-era-parents, the last American era in which food could was even remotely scarce, learned of the value of food. Any grown man that dared to display an eating preference disgusted them, because they could recite stories when such a luxury was not available to most. They also experienced their own limited selection in the military and the wars, and they hoped to instill an appreciation of food in the next generation. Our dad may have been more diligent in his efforts than others’, bordering on obsessed, but he considered it his legacy to pass this knowledge along to his boys.

Other than his concerns regarding my brother’s finicky nature, our dad was also concerned with the fact that he didn’t pay as much attention to his meal as our father felt was necessary. My brother was prone to pausing while he ate. He also enjoyed talking during meals, and he even had the audacity to glance at the TV set while we dined. This was anathema to our dad. When food was on the table, we were to nourish ourselves without distraction. Doing so, paid homage to all that went into the various lines of production that led to our bountiful meal food. An individual seated at my father’s table was to eat with time constraints similar to those of a soldier’s, who appreciates the fact that he has a limited amount of time to get the nutrients contained in those humble C-rations into his body if he wants the energize required to take on the day. He didn’t necessarily want us to eat fast, as much as he required diligence, because he believed it made a statement, a cherished response to eat as if we didn’t know where our next meal was coming from. Consuming food in that manner, at Dad’s table meant that we had deep respect and appreciation of those who gave up their lives to provide us the freedom to eat whatever we wanted.

He never had a problem with me in this regard, as I said, but my brother needed constant reminders. Dad tried everything to get through to his boy. Along with all of the aforementioned techniques, he endeavored to instill appreciation in my brother by informing him of the preparation process involved in the meal before him. My brother was not disobedient or rebellious, nor was he unappreciative or ungrateful. He tried to remain focused on his meal and he attempted to finish it to adhere to that paternal guidance, but he inevitably fell back to his methodical approach to eating. This provided our dad such consternation over the years that he developed a bit of a ballad, what we called the “Eat, Tono, Eat” song. This song, much to my father’s consternation, would become something of hit among friends and family, and it had the following lyrics.

“Eat, Tono, eat.

Eat, Tono, eat.

Eat, Tono, eat.

Oh … eat, Tono, eat.”

Anyone eavesdropping on one of his limited engagements might have mistaken Dad’s “Oh” crescendo with a pleasing and creative bridge to the fourth stanza, but aesthetics did not motivate the man. He was a former military man and tool man. He created utility to fulfill need. He composed no other lyrics for the song, and once it served its purpose and my brother began eating again, dad never sang it again. He may have sang the song a couple times, but the threat of it loomed forever more. He didn’t intend to be humorous, unless using humor furthered his goal of getting my brother to eat. As long he achieved that, my favorite single of all time could whither on the vine for all he cared. Whether or not a listener enjoyed the tune was on them, as far as Dad was concerned, but they would find themselves wanting if they called for an encore.

Taste did matter to dad. He enjoyed well-prepared, flavorful meals as much as the next guy, but anyone can eat a meal that tastes delicious. What separated one man from another, in my father’s worldview, was what that man did to a meal that was less than flavorful. Based upon his internal sliding scale of characterization, eating a foul-tasting, poorly prepared meal was a tribute to our ancestors who could afford little more than a meal of pork and beans on buttered bread. The pièce de résistance of his personal campaign to honor those who came before him arrived in the form of a flavorless, bare bones sandwich. This hallowed sandwich consisted of one slice of the cheapest bologna mankind has been able to produce, between two slices of bread so flavorless that I doubt any competitors in bread industry knew the manufacturer’s name.

Mustard and mayonnaise didn’t make it on dad’s sandwich either, for condiments were luxuries our ancestors never knew about, “back when times were hard”. My father wasn’t the type to pound a point home with a joke, but the thrust of his philosophical approach to eating was that if a man could eat a cheap, flavorless bologna sandwich, sans, condiments, it would put hair on their chest.

On the subject of humor, the reader might infer that part of Dad’s philosophical approach to eating involved at least humorous subtext. While many aspects of Dad’s philosophical approach to life were subject to interpretation that could lead to some unintentional humor, I can say without fear of refutation on this one subject, that the methods he utilized to pass on his deep appreciation of food were never funny to him.

With such a strict, uncompromising mindset drilled into one’s head over decades, one cannot help but feel disgust for those who display preferences. I didn’t draw a direct correlation to my dad’s philosophy for many-a-year, as we do not make connections to the conditioned responses we have. It did become an undeniable source of Dad’s repetitious conditioning, however, when it disgusted me that my brother and his wife allowed my nephew to subsist on a diet of macaroni and cheese, carbohydrates, and sugary sweets. I didn’t expect the young child to make informed, diverse choices, but I expected more of the grown man, my brother, inundated by our father’s unrelenting lessons and philosophical exercises. My concern was not limited to health, though that was part of it, but I couldn’t believe that my brother allowed his father’s grandchild to limit his diet to such a narrow list. I expected my brother, a student of our father’s no-excuses approach, to teach his son how to eat, and to drill into his son’s head the variations of what that meant. My nephew’s excessively short list of preferences disgusted me, but the idea that my brother allowed it percolated inside me until I had to say something.

Some part of me wanted to pass on the entire cannon of Dad’s philosophy, but I didn’t want to insult my brother in front of his wife and son. I bottled up most of the comments I wanted to make, and I drilled it down to one simple comment, “You don’t know how to eat.”

As soon as the words slipped out, I wanted to take them back. I wanted every thought and motivation behind that comment expunged from the record. Those words, along with the act of actually saying them, contradicted the worldview it took me decades to build. I abided by my father’s wishes, but I never did so in silence. I questioned him, analyzed his philosophies with words that could pierce and deflate, and often followed that up with ridicule and mockery.

I was the rebel in the household that swore my father’s ways were wrong, antiquated, and heavy handed. My life’s mission was to juxtapose myself to everything my father stood for, yet here I was attempting to pass on the most sacred tenet of my father’s gospel to his grandson. It was the most powerful encounter I would experience with the power of conditioning, and I shuddered within it.

Although my father never offered a philosophical pivot point for his beliefs on food in general or on and the appreciation thereof, I believe it all centered on individual preferences. Preferences, in his view, were an ostentatious display of luxury, and he chose to deprive himself, in a manner equivalent to a man who buys a moderate sedan when he could easily afford a luxury vehicle.

Another aspect of Dad’s code involved never calling another man out on his preferences. He recited tales of men with preferences, but he did so in the privacy of his own home, for the sole purpose of providing parables, to instill crucial lessons in his boys so we wouldn’t grow up to be like them. He was the product of an era that did not permit one man to comment on the ways and means of another, lest anyone interpret it as one seeking some form of superiority. When I dared to evaluate others failure to live up to dad’s credo, he scolded me for calling another man out like that.

That confused me, as I assumed that the mockery of others helped define the ideals our dad tried to teach us, but he would have none of it. “What a man does in the privacy of his own home is his business,” he said. Those days of appreciating the sanctity of one’s privacy are so far in the rear-view mirror now that no one remembers them anymore. In its place are endless lists of preferences and proselytizing of preferences, until one achieves the desired state of superiority.

This consideration for those beyond our address did not extend to his sons, however, for when we displayed preferences, his honesty was blunt, so much so that it might have appeared brutal to anyone outside our walls. Dad believed that what he did in his own home was his business.

The one asterisk in my dad’s otherwise strict and uncompromising rules on eating was that we could exhibit some preferences, as long as we preferred things in conjunction with an appreciation for the luxury afforded to do so. As long as we didn’t indulge in what he considered elitist preferences, and as long as we didn’t indulge in our preferences to achieve superiority and wander onto a plane of disgust for those of us who had no such luxury, he permitted our few discerning tastes.

“Those who had real-world concerns of the onslaught of Adolf Hitler and the subsequent spread of communism didn’t have the luxury of preferences,” Dad said on more than one occasion. “They had real-world concerns that plagued them to the point that anyone who engaged in such theoretical nonsense would be ostracized and castigated for the eggheads they were in my time.

“A person who engages in such trivialities has never known true scarcity and sacrifice. He leads the life of blissful ignorance, and we cannot blame him for that. He is a product of his time, but it is his parents, and grandparents, responsibility to inform him that his self-anointed superiority condemns not only those who don’t share his preferences but also those who might not have had the same luxuries afforded to him.”

The Thief’s Mentality

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The best thief I ever knew accused me of stealing, lying, and cheating so often that I began to question my integrity. A woman I dated cheated on me so often that I’m still embarrassed that I wasn’t more aware of her infidelities. Her octopus ink involved her accusing me of cheating on her, and she did it so often that I forgot to pay attention to what she was doing to me. If their goals were to prevent me from analyzing them, they did an excellent job because I spent most of my time defending myself around them. Some might call what they did projection, others might call it deflection or obfuscation, but I believe the games these people played fall under a comprehensive, multi-tiered umbrella I call the thief’s mentality.

Kurt Lee introduced me to the confusing mind of a deceptive person. The art of deception was such a key component of his personality that he thought he was able to spot transgressions gestating in the minds of those around us. In the manner a professional saxophone player spots nuances in the play of another, Kurt Lee spotted the intricacies of manipulation around him, and he did so from the same angle of admiration. Yet, he put so much effort and focus into tuning into their frequencies that his instincts often led him astray.

Kurt taught me more about deception than any other person I’ve encountered, movie I’ve watched, or book I’ve read on the subject. He would serve as my prototype for those who would exhibit a wide array of similar traits, traits I would only later deem the characteristics of the thief’s mentality.

The most interesting aspect about him, a characteristic that might defy that which I will describe throughout this piece, was his charm. When it served him, Kurt Lee could be the nicest, most engaging, and infectious person you’ve ever met. He was also a funny guy, and genuinely funny types have a way of disarming us, unless we stick around long enough to learn more about the games they play.

Those who knew Kurt Lee, on a superficial level, envied him for the ways in which he openly defied authority figures without guilt. Those who actually spent as much time around Kurt Lee as I did, however, witnessed that for all the charisma a piece of work (POS) displays, they ultimately end up destroying themselves from the inside out.

One afternoon while on a city bus, Kurt decided to play with the crocheted ball on top of the stocking cap of the elderly woman who sat in front of him. My role in this spectacle may be one of the things I have to answer for on Judgment Day, because I found his appalling act hysterical.

I was young, we both were, but I was so fascinated by this that I now ask myself why? I was learning and learning takes all shapes. We learn Geometry, History, and what to do and what not to do from our peers. We also learn answers to the question of why a young male, in the prime of his life, shouldn’t play with ball atop an old woman’s stocking cap. We learn the difference between a Kurt Lee and ourselves, and the answers are fascinating. Is it all about morality, I asked myself, or does it have more to do with common decency? My mother taught me that when a young, healthy male sees an elderly woman sitting alone, he should smile at her and try to think up something kind to say to brighten her day. My mother taught me to hold the door for her, and she said that I should consider it a privilege to give up my seat to that woman on the city bus, if no other seats were available.

Not only did Kurt Lee ignore those conventions, he chose to pursue the opposite. He chose to violate the sense of security of one of most vulnerable member of our culture by playing with the ball atop her stocking cap. It was wrong on so many levels, of course, but it was also a fascinating exploration of human nature. How would this old woman react? How would a real POS counter her reaction? Why did he do it in the first place? Did he think he would get away with it? Did he even care? I would never know the answer to the latter questions, because I didn’t know Kurt on that level, but my fascination with the answers to the former led me to urge him on with laughter. That was wrong, too, of course, but I now believe my laughter was borne of curiosity. I wanted to learn more about the moral codes by which we all abide. I hoped to learn all that by watching another solidify my rationale, with no regard for the consequences of violating them. My thinking was not that complex, at the time, but I couldn’t wait to see how this episode would end, and I dare say that most of those who are more successful in abiding by the standards our mothers taught us would not have been able to look away either.

The vulnerable, elderly woman eventually turned on Kurt, and she did so with an angry expression. She allowed the first few flicks of the ball atop her stocking cap go, presumably taking a moment to muster up the courage to tell him off, and then she gave him that angry look. Kurt Lee appeared ready to concede to that initial, nonverbal admonition, until he saw me laughing. Egged on by me, he did it three more times before she reached a point of absolute frustration that led her to say something along the lines of, “Stop it, you young punk!”

To that, Kurt began thrusting his hips forward in his seat, while looking at me, whispering, “She just wants unusual carnal relations!” As a teenager trying to elicit more laughter from another teen, Kurt Lee did not use that term. He selected the most vulgar term he could to describe his extrapolation of her desires.

***

Had Kurt Lee decided to stick his middle finger up in the face of a healthier, younger adult, it would have been just as difficult to avoid watching. The fact that he chose such a sacred cow of our culture for his rebellion, however, made his actions over-the-top hilarious. In my young, unformed mind, this was a real life equivalent to David Letterman’s man-on-the-street segments, taken up ten notches on the bold-o-meter. I would later learn that Kurt’s motivations did not involve making profound statements about our societal conventions. He just did things. He was a doer, and doers just do what they do and leave all of the messy interpretations of what they do to others. I would later learn, by watching Kurt Lee, that he selected his victims based on their inability to fight back. In this vein, Kurt Lee was something of a coward, but I couldn’t know the full scope of Kurt Lee at the time. At the time, I found his actions so bold that I couldn’t look away, and I couldn’t stop laughing.

I encountered a wide variety of thieves in the decades that followed Kurt Lee, but they paled in comparison to his mentality, his philosophy, and what drove him to be so different from everyone I had ever met. To listen to him speak on the topic, however, there was nothing different about Kurt Lee. He believed he simply had the courage of his convictions. He ascribed to the more conventional line of thought that we were all afraid to be like him, but he added that the rest of us have had this part of our makeup denied to us by our parents and teachers for so long that we now believe we are different. The import of his message was that this was not about me, and it was not about him. It’s about human nature and the thief’s mentality.

“If you could get away with it, you’d do it too,” was his answer to questions we posed. “You mean to tell me you’ve never stolen anything? Ever? All right then, let’s talk about reality.” Kurt Lee was a thief, and like most thieves, he did not defend his position from the position of being a thief. He would substitute an exaggeration of your moral qualms regarding thievery, claiming that any person who has stolen even once is in no position to judge someone who steals on a regular basis.

In short bursts, and on topic, Kurt Lee could lower the most skilled debater to the ground. We called him a master debater, with the innuendo intended, because it was almost impossible to pin him down on specifics. It was a joy to watch. Prolonged exposure, however, opened up all these windows into his soul.

When we asked him how a guy from the sticks could afford the latest, top-of-the-line zipper pants, a pair of sunglasses that would put an employed fella back two weeks’ pay, and an original, signed copy of the Rolling Stones, Some Girls. He would tell us, but even his most ardent defender had a hard time believing Santa Claus would be that generous to even the nicest kids on his list.

Kurt Lee stole so often by the time I came to know him, the act of shoplifting lost much of its thrill. He decided to challenge himself in a manner top athletes, and top news anchors do, by hiring third-party analysts to scrutinize the minutiae of their performance. He asked me to watch him steal baseball cards from a baseball card shop owner that we agreed needed to learn a lesson, because the man refused to buy our cards 99 percent of the time. On those rare occasions when he agreed to buy them, his offers were so low they were almost insulting.

I posed a theory about our transactions with this shop owner. I theorized that the intent behind his frequent refusals to buy our cards was to establish his bona fides as a resident expert of value. That way, when he informed us that any of our cards were of value, we were ready to jump at the chance, no matter what amount he offered. “By doing so,” I concluded, “he actually makes us feel more valuable, because we think we finally have something worthy of one of his offers.”

“You’re right,” Kurt Lee said. “Let’s get him.”

I felt validated for coming up with a theory that Kurt Lee accepted, but in hindsight, I think Kurt Lee would’ve used anything I said to motivate me to conspire against the owner.

“One thing,” Kurt Lee said before we entered. “I don’t know if this needs to be said, but I’m going to say it anyway. Don’t watch me, don’t talk to me, and be careful about how often you look at me. Don’t try to avoid looking at me either.” When I laughed at that, a laugh that expressed some confusion, he added, “Just don’t do anything stupid or too obvious.”

I had reservations, of course, but I considered this an invitation into a world I never knew, and Kurt Lee’s provisos might have been necessary, because I was not only excited by Kurt’s invitation, I was just as nervous and scared. I was what a number of senior citizens called a good kid, and up until the moment I met Kurt Lee, I led a very sheltered existence. Before entering the baseball call shop, I considered the idea that my foreknowledge of this crime could implicate me as an accessory, but I couldn’t shake the asexual intimacy Kurt Lee was sharing with me, with this invitation into his world.

Standing near the door stop, Kurt Lee opened his pockets, in the manner a magician might, and he asked me to confirm that he had no cards in his pockets. I considered that an unusual act of bravado, but I didn’t stop to think about what it implied in the moment.

Throughout the course of our hour spent in the shop, I didn’t witness Kurt Lee steal one thing, and I mocked him for it. “What happened? I thought you were going to steal something,” I said as we stood outside the store. “I’m beginning to think you’re chicken.”

He allowed me to mock him without saying a word. When I finished, he opened his jacket to show me his inner pockets. What I saw knocked me back a couple steps. I actually took a step back when I witnessed the number of baseball cards that lined his inner pockets. I would’ve been impressed if he displayed one card, and three or four would’ve shocked me, but the sheer number of cards he stole without me noticing one act of thievery, led me to believe that Kurt Lee wasted his abilities on the petty act of shoplifting. I considered telling him to try his hand at being a magician for I thought what I just witnessed the skills of a maestro of deception. I was so shocked I couldn’t think of anything to say. If I could’ve managed words, I would’ve said something nerdy about how I thought Kurt should find a way to employ this skill in a marketable way. 

Soon after recovering from that shock, I began to wonder how one acquires such a deft hand. As with any acquired skill, there is some level of trial and error involved, and nestled within that lies the need to find a utility that permits the thief to proceed uninhibited by shame. A skilled performer in the arts or athletics delights in displaying their ability to the world, in other words, but a thief has to operate in the shadows, and they acquire their skill with a modicum of shame attached. Success as a thief, it would seem to those of us on the outside looking in, requires the potential thief to either defeat that sense of shame or find a way to manage it.

Shame, some argue, like other unpleasant emotions, becomes more manageable with greater familiarity. When a father introduces shame to his child, in the brutal assessments he makes regarding the value of his kid, the child becomes intimately familiar with shame before they are old enough to combat it. When such brutal assessments are then echoed by a mother’s concern that their child can’t do anything right, the combined effort can have a profound effect on a child. When those parents then console the child with a suggestion that while the child may be a bad seed, but they’re no worse than anyone else is, something gestates in the child. The moral relativism spawned from these interactions suggests that the search for the definitions of right and wrong is over, and the sooner the child accepts that, the more honest they will become. Seeing their mother scold a teacher for punishing their child for a transgression only clarifies this confusion a little more. In that relativist scolding, the child hears their mother inform the teacher that their child can do no wrong, and they see her unconditional support firsthand. Over time, the child must acknowledge that their parents will not always be there, so they will need to develop internal defense mechanisms in line with what they’re learned. The child also learns to accept these realities for what they are, for the Lee family has never had the courage necessary to commit suicide.

I hated discounting the level of individual ingenuity on Kurt Lee’s part, but he was simply too good at the various forms of deception for it to have been something he arrived at on his own. Attempting to source it might be a fool’s errand, but I wondered if I were able to sort through Kurt’s genealogical tree, if I might find sedimentary layers of grievance, envy, frustration, and desperation that worked their way down to him. To those who consider seeking evidence of foundational layers a bit of a stretch, I ask how much of our lives do we spend rebelling against, and acquiescing to parental influence, and how many of us can say we are entirely free from it?

Poker players tell me that everyone has what they call a tell, which is a twitch, a habit, or a characteristic that we cannot hide when we’re attempting to deceive. “It’s your job to find it during the game,” they say. I don’t doubt what they say. I’m sure we all have tells, and I probably have a ton of them, because I get nervous when I’m being deceitful. When I stole, I felt guilty, ashamed, and I had anxiety issues. What if I kept doing it? What if I had decades of experience? Would I get better at it, and would I find a mechanism to drain the shame of it all? Some in the field of neurology even suggest that research shows that our brains change when we lie more often. Does someone with a thief’s mentality hone the ability to manage emotions most of us normally experience with theft, lying, and cheating so well that it would take a maestro of deception to spot them in the poker game?  

I was so obsessed with this, at one point, that I accidentally stepped over the line between being curious and badgering, something Kurt Lee made apparent in his volatile reaction:

“You think you’re better than me?” Kurt Lee asked, employing the universal get-out-of-judgment free card of moral relativism. This time-honored redirect relies on the lessons taught to us by our mothers, that we are no better than anyone else is, but Kurt’s rant began to spiral out of control when he tried to pivot to what he believed its logical extension.

If no one is better than anyone else is and everyone resides on the cusp of whatever Kurt Lee was, the logical extension required the inclusion of an individual that many perceived to be so harmless it was almost laughable to suggest otherwise. The individual, in this case, was a kid named Pete Pestroni. If Kurt Lee’s arguments were going to hold water, the idea that Pete Pestroni was a wolf in sheep’s clothing would have to become an agreed upon fact. I’m still not sure why Kurt Lee went down the Pete Pestroni road so often, but I suspect it had something to do with the idea that if Pete was immune, in one form or another, everyone else had to be too. In Kurt’s estimation, Pete was just too weak, or too scared, to let his inner-wolf run wild. We would laugh at the implausibility of Pete Pestroni having a Kurt Lee trapped inside, a thief dying to come out, but our intention was to laugh with Kurt Lee. He wouldn’t even smile, however, because some part of him believed that if everyone was a thief, then no one was, at least to the point of separating the thief out for comparative analysis. This was a sacred chapter in Kurt Lee’s personal bible, and an ingredient of the thief’s mentality that took me decades to grasp completely.

The thief’s mentality is a mindset that involves a redirect of exposing an uncomfortable truth, or a hypocrisy, in others, so that the thief might escape a level of scrutiny that could lead to an uncomfortable level of introspection. An individual with a thief’s mentality may steal, but that person is just as apt to lie and cheat. The thief’s mentality begins as a coping mechanism for dealing with the character flaws that drive them to do what they do, but it progresses from those harmless, white lies to a form of deception that requires a generational foundation. 

The thief’s mentality requires deflection, by way of subterfuge, as a means to explain the carrier’s inability to trust beyond the point that they should be trusted, but some thieves’ outward distrust of others reaches a point of exaggeration that says far more about them than those they accuse. Their cynicism is their objectivity, and others’ faith in humanity is a subjective viewpoint, one that we must bear. We live in a dog-eat-dog, screw-or-be-screwed world in which those who trust anyone outside their own homes are naïve to the point of hopelessness. If the listener is to have any hope of surviving in such a world, it is incumbent upon them to see passed the façades and through the veneer, others present to the truth.

The truth, in Kurt Lee’s worldview, held that TV anchors with fourteen-inch parts, and perfect teeth, ended their days by going home to beat their wives. He didn’t believe that a person could attain wealth by honest means. He insisted that because some states convicted some Catholic priests as pedophiles that meant all Catholic priests were, and he had a particular fascination with infidelity in the White House. “You think JFK and Clinton are different? They’re just the ones that got caught is all.” There was also his contention that little old ladies who complained about having someone toy with the balls on the stocking caps just want to have unusual carnal relations. As with most tenets of a person’s worldview, there was some grain of truth in Kurt Lee’s, but he often had to put forth a great deal of effort to support it.

In most such discussions, Kurt Lee’s audience was immune. “I’m not talking about you,” he would say to his audience, so they might view the subject matter from a shared perspective. If we began to view ourselves as an ally, we might join him in convincing our world that he’s not that bad, or the world is as bad as he is. Yet, our agreed upon immunity from his charges begins to fracture in the course of the thief’s logical extensions. When that happens, the thief turns their accusations on us. We might consider ourselves all virtuous and moral, but the thief knows everything there is to know about hidden agendas. They maintain a perpetual state of readiness for that day when we break free of the constraints of morality and loyalty to expose our evil, naked underbelly to the world. The thief has us all figured out, because they know those lies we tell. It’s the thief’s mentality.

Thieves may even believe their exaggerated or false accusations, regardless of all we’ve done to establish ourselves as good, honest people. The validity of their accusation, however, pales in comparison to their need to keep us, the subjects of their accusations, in a perpetual state of trustworthiness. Kurt Lee, and my adventurous ex-girlfriend, made their accusations to keep me in check in a manner they knew I should’ve kept them in check. The import of that line provides us a key to understanding why an individual with a thief’s mentality would make such a charge against us, and the Pete Pestronis of the world who are so honest it’s laughable to suggest otherwise. Some might call such accusations psychological projection, the inclination one has to either deny or defend their qualities by exaggerating comparative examples in everyone else. Others might say that it’s some sort of deflection or obfuscation on the part of the thief, but I believe it all falls under a comprehensive, multi-tiered umbrella that I call the thief’s mentality. Still others might suggest that Kurt Lee’s accusations were born of theories he had about me, the people around him, and humanity in general. If that is the case, his theories were autobiographical.

Whether it was as complex as all that on an unconscious level, or some simple measures Kurt Lee developed over the years to prevent people from calling him a POS, I witnessed some try to turn the table him on the accusations by telling Kurt Lee that other people trust them. “What are you talking about?” they’d ask when Kurt would start in on one of his ‘You’re no better than me’ rants. “My guess is when you come over for family reunions, your aunts and uncles hide their wallets and purses. They don’t do that to me, because I don’t steal, cheat and lie.”

Kurt Lee’s response to this was so clever that I thought it beyond his years. Again, I hate to discount individual ingenuity, but it just seemed too clever for Kurt to deliver as quickly as he did when he said:

“So, if someone trusts you think that means that you’re trustworthy?” Kurt Lee responded. He said the word trustworthy, as if it was an accusation, but that wasn’t the brilliant part of his response. As brilliance often does, his arrived in a section of the argument where the participants will say whatever they can to win, regardless what those words reveal. Kurt Lee suggested, in different words, that those who consider themselves a beacon of trustworthiness are suffering from a psychosis of another stripe. The reason I considered this response so perfect, as it pertained to this specific argument, was that it put the onus of being trustworthy on the person who challenged Kurt Lee’s trustworthiness. It also put further questions regarding Kurt Lee’s character –or what his inability to trust the people in his life said about him– on the back burner, until the questioner could determine whether the level of his own trustworthiness was a delusion that group thought led him to believe.

Crafting the Frame

With all that Kurt Lee taught me about this fascinating mentality, always fresh in mind, I’ve had a number of otherwise trustworthy friends ask me how to deal with the thief in their life. They failed to understand why their loved one couldn’t trust them in even the most benign arenas of life.

It stressed one of my friends out, “I don’t know what I did to damage his trust, but no one’s ever accused me of half of the things he does.” She said that she considered herself a trustworthy person, and she always had, but  she was insecure about it, as we all are. “How do I win him back? How do I regain his trust?” she asked.

“It’s not about you,” I told her. “It’s the thief’s mentality.” I didn’t enjoy saying this to her, because I was basically telling her that she was trapped in a relationship with the afflicted. I explained the mindset of the thief, as I learned it from my personal experiences with Kurt Lee, and she later told me that it helped.

“It helped in a weird way,” she said. “I finally had a name for what he did. Every time he accused me of cheating on him, or wanting to cheat on him, I’d think, it’s the thief’s mentality. It didn’t stop the accusations or the insecurity I felt afterwards, but it helped in a weird way to know that someone else went through all this. It sort of helped me frame him in a way I never considered before.” 

When I told her that she wasn’t trapped in the relationship, she said, “Oh, I know. I could dump him like yesterday’s trash,” but she never did. She ended up marrying the guy. So, whatever short-term relief she experienced with this idea that her loved one was never going to trust her anymore than he trusted himself dispelled it.

The damage thieves, like my friend’s lover and Kurt Lee, incur is irreparable. They likely do not enjoy the lives they’ve created for themselves, and the idea that they can’t even trust the one person in their lives that they could, or should, but their accusations do allow them to spread their misery around a little. It lightens their load to transfer some of their toxins to others. It also gives them a little lift to know that we are a little less trusting than we were before we met them. They must find some relief in the belief that they are not such an aberration, but this relief is temporary, as the toxins that have made them what they are as endemic to the biological chemistry as white and red blood cells. Nevertheless, it must please them to know that after our interactions with them, we now view humanity in the same cynical, all-hope-is-lost manner they do.

If it’s true that a mere two percent are self-aware and reflective, then the lack of self-awareness, at least as it pertains to what we are, and what we are to become, is as endemic to the thief’s mentality as it is in every other walk of life. Like the rest of us, thieves do not believe they live on an exaggerated pole of morality. Rather, they believe they reside in the middle, alongside the rest of us, somewhere just north of the good side of the fuzzy dividing line. They also know that we’re all tempted to do that one thing that could tick us over to the south side. What separates them, to their mind, is their lack of fear, coupled with their refusal to conform to the norms their parents and other mentors taught them. They are also keenly aware that we place most of humanity on their side of the fuzzy line because we all have problems trusting those we don’t know well enough to determine whether they will make moral decisions in life. Some take this natural state of skepticism a step further. Some thieves’ exaggerated, outward distrust for those around them says far more about them than about those they condemn and accuse. It’s the thief’s mentality.